Varner: Fathers who step in

As my stepfather neared the end of his long battle with pancreatic cancer, his 10 children flocked to his side. As people expressed sympathy about our dying father, I always felt compelled to correct them: stepfather.

The biologically correct term didn’t matter in the end. He was the glue that held fast the fabric of our blended family. I remind myself as Father’s Day nears that when my stepfather died, my father died.

I’m in a group of the one-in-three Americans who are part of a stepfamily. Our familial union was like a real-life episode of “Modern Family,” with enough emotional baggage to weigh down an airplane.

Separately, my stepfather and mother were two people whose response to the twin burdens of poverty and early parenting was a whirlwind life of partying and drinking. But something changed when they met each other. They got sober, bought a house and spent untold amounts of money and time on lawyers and courtrooms to collect the remains of their broods.

My stepfather worked for the federal government during the day and, to ease the financial pressures of his new family, worked the full-time overnight shift at a hospital lab. He arrived home from his first job at 5 in the evening, ate dinner and was asleep by 6:30 and back up and out by 9 p.m. Despite his tight schedule, he was known to my younger siblings as the chauffeur for school dances and the one to call in the middle of the night.

When we met, my stepfather understood immediately that his and my time for a father-daughter relationship had passed. Instead he became a friend and cheerleader, poring over every word I’ve ever written. Every setback I have had, he marveled at my perseverance to get back on the horse.

“Nothing can break your spirit,” he would say. I doubted those words but I always stood a little taller hearing them as though my stiffened resolve would give them a fighting chance of being true.

My mother was fiercely loyal to him and, after he died, to his memory. “He was Pops when your own father couldn’t be bothered,” she told us more than once.

So when he lay dying, the six girls and four boys whose lives he affected deeply came calling. Two daughters ferried him back and forth for weekly chemotherapy treatments. A third slept on a cot next to his bed. An estranged son kept abreast daily of his prognosis but shied away from a visit.

My stepfather dictated a letter letting him know he loved him anyway. Another son called from his home in a tiny hamlet on the North Carolina-Virginia border.

My familial anecdote is meant to push back against the lack of attention and appreciation paid to stepdads. It seems they barely get noticed unless they’re doing the perp walk in front of a courthouse.

Yet, a society fractured by high divorce rates and, in many communities, generation after generation of absentee biological fathers, rightly counts on stepfathers to rebuild broken families.